Irene Vallejo (2019)

A history of books and reading.

This is a deep and cleverly-constructed history, running from the invention of papyrus scrolls to their replacement by parchment (and later paper) books. The transition away from papyrus brought with it a huge increase in comvenience – but also in the longevity of works, in that the physical stability and portability of books made it less likely that all copies of a work would disappear. Manuscripts needed to be physically copied to create another copy that might survive independently of the original; scrolls needed to be copied because they otherwise disintegrate.

Equally fascinating is the way books formed a central part of culture in the ancient world. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion of Roman libraries built in two rooms, one for the Latin and one for the Greek, and how the Romans saw and took up the challenges of Greek civilisation as a partial model (and counter-model) for their own. The centrality of literature to that endeavour is easy to overlook in more martial histories of Rome.

It’s also interesting to see the ways in which things now commonplace were once technological innovations – such as tables of contents, library catalogues, punctuation, and the like. These were shaped by the capabilities and limitations of scrolls as a storage medium, and have persisted functionally unchanged down to the present day.

5/5. Finished Saturday 4 November, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tim Danton

A detailed and well-researched explortion of 1980s home and school computers: the two were often the same. All the main players are here: Research Machines, Acorn, Sinclair, Amstrad, Atari, Commodore, as well as some of the lesser-known machines.

The interations between the companies are interesting, as are the beliefs and intentions of some of the individuals involved. The relationship between Acorn and Sinclair over the BBC Micro are well-known, and include a fist-fight in a Cambridge pub when Clive Sinclair thinks Chris Curry has been underhanded. But I learned a lot about how Sinclair, Alan Sugar, and several others never really believed in home computers, even as they were changing the face of Britain (and my own life). Sinclair in particular saw the future as being pocket TVs and electric cars – and so was strangely right, and radically ahead of his time.

It’s strange that so much innovation happened in Britain, at a time of de-industrialisation. In many ways the times were right. It’s possible to build an 8-bit computer and its operating system by hand, without enormous outlay in supporting technology – which isn’t in any way to belittle the innovation and talent involved. But later generations required more industry and investment that the British players simply couldn’t find, so the world moved on to IBM PCs and games consoles. I have to say I still miss the Acorns and Amstrads and Ataris I had, and it was great to see them celebrated in this book and learn more about how they came about.

5/5. Finished Wednesday 1 November, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tim Marshall (2021)

A successor to Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics that attempts to do the same thing: to argue that geography constrains the pursuit of politics more than we might realise. It does this, although as a sequel it’s far less impactful than the original, and seems to spend too much time on the historical progression of the chosen countries and not enough on the ways these histories actually manifest the geographical constraints under which they’re constrained. Indeed, some of the countries’ geographies (such as Saudi Arabia’s) seem almost irrelevant compared to their geologies.

The inclusion of “space” as a country is interesting from a political perspective, and Marshall does manage to show that it has a “geography” of sorts – as Robert Heinlein is quoted as saying, once you’re in Earth orbit you’re halfway to anywhere, since getting up the gravity well is the major transport cost. I’m assuming this will be the subject of a later book.

2/5. Finished Friday 20 October, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Donella H. Meadows (2008)

An introduction to systems thinking for practitioners. This is a book that avoids all the mathematics of queues and games, while still drawing heavily on their influence and allowing those wanting to learn and apply systems thinking to gain an understanding of the main ideas.

There’s a huge need for more systems thinking. It boils down to understanding the way systems “flow”, with resources entering, being processed, and leaving. In doing so we find systems that can have several “steady” states, still operating at full capacity but not maintaining a regular and predictable behaviour. We also find that systems can switch very quickly from one stable state to another, perhaps less desirable, and it might not be as easy to get out of such a state as it was to get in to it: behavioural change can be difficult or impossible to reverse.

All these ideas have proper mathematical underpinnings. The great thing about this book is that it consumes and presents those underpinnings without ever actually referring to them. It treats systems theory as a machine that anyone can use: you might get more precise answers from a more scientific analysis, but eiven without this you can still apply the ideas intuitively to gain a better understanding of the world. I think it’s a distinctive addition to the literature on complex systems.

4/5. Finished Tuesday 12 September, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Mary Wellesley (2021)

Everyone associates mediæval manuscripts with monasteries and monks, but nuns had an enormous part to play as well, including in some of the best-known works. That’s the central observation of this extremely enjoyable book. It’s niche in the sense of really appealing to caligraphers and classicists, but it also serves to show (once again) that the Middle Ages (and before) were a socially richer period than we often imagine.

As well as Latin, we’re exposed to a lot of Old and Middle English, carefully translated and glossed to make the context comprehensible. I can imagine that experts might object to some of the modernisation, but for an non-specialist it was quite clarifying.

About the only negative point was that I suspect the book emerged from Mary Wellesley’s PhD thesis – and that sometimes shows in places where she feels the need to justify herself vaery carefully against the existing literature. None of that spoils the readability and insightfulness, though.

5/5. Finished Friday 1 September, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)